Aronian Shuffles Svidler

Levon Aronian won the first two Chess960 games of the eight-game Clerical Medical match at the Mainz Classic. He was worse in both games, probably lost in the first, but grit and his perpetually sharp tactical eye saw him through. The games were Chess960 positions 756 and 747, by the way. ChessBase has a report on the day up, but the ChessBase 9 javascript replay pages don't work with shuffle chess. Nor can Fritz or ChessBase import the Chess960 PGN the official Mainz site is putting out. Booo. A tip from camembert pointed out that the free program Arena has no trouble with replaying these files. You can replay all the games online if you scroll down here.

I just tested Arena 1.99beta2 with the Chess960 PGN from the Mainz site and it worked dandy. Just took a minute to download and unzip, no installation required. There are also freeware engines for Arena that play Chess960 (necessary because of the castling). Spike is quite strong, although it took me a while to install it in Arena as a new UCI engine and figure out how to get it to analyze along with the moves from an imported game. (There's a little "Analyze" button under the notation and make sure Ponder is off before you click it.)

I did go to the time and effort to manually enter the first two Aronian-Svidler games into Fritz 9. The only native ChessBase engine I have that can play/analyze Chess960 is HIARCS 10, apparently. Fritz and ChessBase 9 recognize this once the games are entered in CBH format. (I got an error when I tried to install Spike as a UCI engine into Fritz and ChessBase as a test.) I put the first two games into a CBV for your downloading convenience. You should be able to replay them fine in any Fritz 9 generation program or ChessBase 9 if you have it updated (see the Help menu). I wish the Mainz people would offer CBV downloads and/or ChessBase would get their programs to figure out Chess960 PGN. Let's rub that magic DD lamp, guys.

Speaking of rubbing lamps, Teimour Radjabov somehow beat Vishy Anand in the second game of their Grenke Leasing Mainz rapid match. He looked dead and gone after Anand nabbed a few pawns. But Anand uncharacteristically lost control as things headed into an endgame and White had enough tricks to complicate the matter when queens came off. Black was already struggling with a miserable bishop on a8 when he blundered with 28..Ng4 and was soon lost. Impressive stuff from Radjabov considering the opposition. The first game was a correct draw against Radja's Sveshnikov. 16..Ne7 was Radjabov's novelty after he played 16..Nb4 against Volokitin a few weeks ago in Biel.